PRESS RELEASE

Argentina Will Challenge U.S. Supreme Court’s Ruling for Vulture Funds

June 19, 2014 (EIRNS)—In a nationally televised speech June 16, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sharply warned that her government will not give in to the “extortion” reflected in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision earlier that day, refusing to hear Argentina’s appeal of a lower court ruling mandating that her government pay $1.3 billion to predatory vulture funds NML Capital and Aurelius Capital.

These so-called “holdouts” speculated on Argentina’s defaulted debt in 2008, made obscene profits, and refused to participate in the government’s 2005 and 2010 debt restructuring, demanding instead to be paid the full face value of the defaulted bonds they had purchased at pennies on the dollar.

Understanding that imperial financiers have declared war on her nation, with the aim of wiping it—and any other country asserting its sovereignty—off the map, the Argentine President has drawn a line in the sand.

“No president of a sovereign nation can subject their nation and people to extortion,” she warned. In domestic terms, Fernández said, the Supreme Court has rewarded financial speculators, who represent a mere 1% of Argentine creditors, against 93% who participated in the restructuring, with the aim of forcing that restructuring to “collapse like a house of cards, and along with it, obviously, the Argentine Republic.”

But, as she correctly noted, the decision has international implications as well, against the backdrop of a worsening global situation.

“I wasn’t surprised by this ruling,” Fernandez said. “I expected it ... because this isn’t an economic or financial problem, or even a legal one.” The Supreme Court has defended “a form of global domination of financial derivatives intended to bring nations to their knees.” Should this global economic model continue to operate unhindered, she warned, it will “produce unimaginable tragedies,” as it is fed by the “blood, hunger and exclusion of millions of youth worldwide who are jobless, with no access to education.”

Her government has negotiated responsibly and has paid its creditors and will continue to do so, she said. “But we will not be accomplices in this form of ‘doing business,’ for lack of a better word, which some seek to install in the world.”